Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

noaa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 578 posts

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#461

Post by flowerlad »

linuxhansl wrote: post #303

Imagine an asteroid would be on trajectory to collide with earth in (say) 2025. Possible order of hypothetical events: 1. Scientist discover the asteroid. Calculate risk of collision. 2. Asteroid comes closer, probability of impact is calculated as high. 3. People will start saying that we cannot let our economy be controlled by the specter of an asteroid. 4. The asteroid becomes visible. You can see it with your bar…

Actually there won't be any problem getting support for dealing with the asteroid. Asteroid collision is easy to understand, even for uneducated people.

Political support depends on average people understanding the cause, and not needing to change behavior too much. Asteroid collision satisfies both requirements, but climate change satisfies neither.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#462

Post by bjoli »

whall6 wrote: post #271
dleslie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society will collapse when we become unable to ensure food security, and massive climate refugee migrations overwhelm our infrastructure.

I believe that the globe is heating up. And I’m not being snarky. However, I fail to see how climate change means food insecurity.

https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#463

Post by throwaway894345 »

danaris wrote: post #454
throwaway894345 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with your characterization, but the salient bit that we seem to agree on is that Democrats profess a belief in the existential threat of climate change and still aren't organized to combat it. That seems like a bigger problem than Republican obstructionism (what is there to obstruct if Dems don't even have a coherent, remotely realistic plan)? While progressives are aligned on the Green…

From my perspective, the bigger problem by far is that everyone to the right of our skewed American political center (this includes some Democrats, particularly those I named) do not believe that it is critical to take any action at all on climate change. The more people agree "yes, we need to solve problem X", the more likely it is that we (collectively) can get something passed to start moving toward change, even i…

> From my perspective, the bigger problem by far is that everyone to the right of our skewed American political center (this includes some Democrats, particularly those I named) do not believe that it is critical to take any action at all on climate change.

I would rather have the 50% who believe climate change is an existential threat behave accordingly rather than have 80% pay empty lip service and rally around token legislation or trojan horses (reconciliation bill, green new deal, etc).

> Or, to put it another way: If the Republicans weren't being obstructionist, the Democrats wouldn't need a strategy to overcome them. They'd be able to put their energy toward coming up with actual policy solutions.

Republican obstructionism is a real thing, but the idea that Republicans are obstructing Democrats from crafting a reasonable agenda is patently absurd, especially when carbon pricing has been the obvious solution for more than a decade, and it even enjoys some Republican support. But Democrats can't be bothered to make it part of their own agenda because of Republican obstructionism? Come on.

> Biden put out a fairly clear set of legislative goals to push for in order to combat climate change

What are these goals? Are they serious? Or are they some variation on the budget reconciliation bill (i.e., largely symbolic gestures that are bundled haphazardly into a bunch of other spending)?

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#464

Post by lmilcin »

nonbirithm wrote: post #434
lmilcin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is the old, false argument. Population control WOULD be effective at solving the problem. That is if it was humane. Your arguments seems true because at first sight it looks (and it is true) that it is the first world that emits most of the greenhouse gasses. But everybody forgets that the third world countries do also experience progress and will also want industry and cars and air conditioning and KFC and A…

Admittedly, existential despair results from this argument. If population control had been enacted in a humane way centuries ago, maybe I would be one of the millions of people missing from the present. On the other hand, I did not consent to being born, either. It's harrowing to consider that your existence may be a liability on the rest of the human race in the near future. But I'm only capable of despairing over i…

You are way out there with your thinking. Nobody denies born children the right to live.

The idea was more in line of preventing children from being conceived in the first place.

Not that this isn't fraught with moral, philosophical and other problems (just look at China), but at least it is obvious no children are being harmed by not being conceived.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#465

Post by SigmundA »

iammisc wrote: post #381
SigmundA wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never been able to get my head around the religious paradox of God has a plan and free will. Can we make choices that effect the outcome of things or is it all part of Gods plan? It can't be both right? Did God create everything including free will or does it exist outside of his control? I don't blame my program when it does something wrong, I mean I wrote the code that tells it how to behave.

Well I'm religious (although I guess I 'believe' in man-made climate change), so here goes. Of course, every religion will have different answers. The general Christian jist, often twisted by evangelicals and fundamentalists (in my opinion), but still preserved and well-recorded in the annals of Catholic thought is that God is both personal but also perfect. Let's go back in time. Aristotle, from whom a lot of (Weste…

Yeah sorry there is no internal consistency here for me, I do thank you for trying in a honest way.

God created everything including free will and what it means to have it.

God blames and punishes his own creations for excising free will in a way he's deems incorrectly. He's wants us to learn from him and accept him, yet he created us and designed us down to the quark.

Basically for me the buck stops with God, yet he seems to blame us if we stray, why? Is there something outside of God where evil comes from? Who created that?

Again I as programmer cannot blame the program and punish it for its emergent behavior based on the code I wrote that responds to input and makes decisions. The fault is mine especially if I also created the computer and the universe in which it runs, I either change the program or accept its behavior, punishment and blame would just be playing a silly game with myself.

Most responses here seem to revolve around God not following logic, fine there is nothing more to say then, and is truly nonsense, 2 + 2 does not have to equal 4.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#466

Post by mythrwy »

sparrish wrote: post #396
4ec0755f5522 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I have lived my entire life, the hottest I'd ever seen in my is 33C. That would be an unusual year. The hottest summer days might hit 30C. This is 100 years, historically: over 30 is possibly, but unusual. Years where 29C is the hottest day is completely typical. End of June (June! Not even July/August!) we had a heat wave. What would you expect to find in such an event? Maybe 34? That sounds pretty hot. 35? 36…

Anecdotal... let's do it. Where I live, we've had the mildest July in many years. It only hit 90+ for a day or two. That's unusual. We've had more rain and cooler temps than I can remember in a decade.

Same here. Most pleasant summer ever with lots of rain and cooler temps.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#467

Post by noobly »

eloff wrote: post #436
noobly wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, the sun has also been getting hotter, hasn't it? I agree that man contributes to climate change, but quantifying this is where I think the conversation gets interesting. I haven't really gone very far down this hole though as it seems too muddled. And then if you do conclude man is primarily at fault, what do you do? The US is only responsible for so much output, for example, and sources like…

That's a tired talking point. The investigation has been done and it's human activity by a country mile. You can Google it if you're curious. Basically all countries have to cut emissions to zero or nearly zero. I think this is actually looking hopeful. Even China and India are on board. The US must do it's part too and demonstrate leadership in this area. There's a massive phase change in the global economy away fro…

>That's a tired talking point.

Well, I don't talk about this much so wouldn't know. From what I understand, atmospheric physics is extremely complicated, and it sounds like a _very_ hard problem to develop accurate models for, and we're limited to a relatively small sample size. I just have a hard time seeing it, as a field, arriving at clean conclusions.. I'll have to read into it more later, though.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#468

Post by noobly »

slg wrote: post #426
linuxhansl wrote: post #303

Imagine an asteroid would be on trajectory to collide with earth in (say) 2025. Possible order of hypothetical events: 1. Scientist discover the asteroid. Calculate risk of collision. 2. Asteroid comes closer, probability of impact is calculated as high. 3. People will start saying that we cannot let our economy be controlled by the specter of an asteroid. 4. The asteroid becomes visible. You can see it with your bar…

The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that. The rich and powerful are always going to be protected from experiencing the worst aspects of climate change. They won't be the ones working outside when the air quality is dangerous from wildfires. They aren't going to be the ones who can't sleep because it is 90 degrees in their home. They won't be st…

> The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that.

And you can see an asteroid heading straight for you, anyone skeptical could just get, or borrow, a scope. I don't think an asteroid collision would induce a politicized disinfo campaign personally, it's too concrete.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#469

Post by lhorie »

SigmundA wrote: post #220
pessimizer wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a severely underestimated group of religious people who think that only God controls the weather, His reasons for what he does with it are not for you to evaluate, and that saying that humans can change the weather is blasphemy. It's easy to make fun of, but the most direct experience that people have of a God who controls the universe would be the weather. These people need to be approached theologically; s…

I have never been able to get my head around the religious paradox of God has a plan and free will. Can we make choices that effect the outcome of things or is it all part of Gods plan? It can't be both right? Did God create everything including free will or does it exist outside of his control? I don't blame my program when it does something wrong, I mean I wrote the code that tells it how to behave.

> I have never been able to get my head around the religious paradox of God has a plan and free will.

I think this can actually be explained in a fairly straightforward way via science: the laws of physics dictate precisely how reality ought to behave, and yet we have thoughts and we make decisions and we believe to be largely free to do whatever we want even though our conscience and our entire being are essentially just a big clump of chemical reactions governed by the laws of physics.

According to some pantheist flavors, the laws of physics are the omnipotent property of God - aka "His plan" in christian lingo - as well as the omnipresent property.

The interesting thing about this interpretation is that it's immune to the determinism paradox: it doesn't matter if the laws of physics dictate a "plan" or whether "we" can randomly affect it (the definition of "we" is itself a big philosophical rabbit hole btw), because by their very definition, the laws of physics are what they are, and they always hold true no matter what.

Re: It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record

#470

Post by jacquesm »

whall6 wrote: post #109
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as the next big thing. It is.

Well, not yet it isn’t.

That depends on where you live. Global warming, just like the future, isn't distributed evenly. But for more and more places every year the effects are undeniable. 55 million people displaced and 150K dead last year alone, expected to increase for the foreseeable future.
Post reply on HN